The present invention concerns the power management of a receiver for signals transmitted in bursts of data packets.
When signals are transmitted in bursts, it is convenient to reduce the power provided to some components between the bursts in order to reduce the overall power consumption of the receiver.
This is the case, for example, in receivers for digital television in which data can be time sliced and spread over several bursts, each burst being identified by an identifier also called PID. More precisely, the bursts comprise several packets, each of them with the same PID.
Usually, in such receivers, a host processor of the receiver commands a co-processor implemented on a different chip and which, for example, is in charge of the demodulation of the data bursts.
Some existing receivers have a power management function implemented in the host processor which sends instructions to other components, namely the tuner and the demodulator, to drive them to switch between an active state and an idle state.
However, performing such a power management requires computation time from the host processor and induces an increase of the traffic on the bus between the host processor and the co-processor.
Furthermore, this bus must be kept available in order to transmit instructions to switch to the active state without delay to avoid missing bursts of data.
Due to these drawbacks, such a power management is not efficient.
The aim of the present invention is to solve these problems by providing an efficient demodulator with power management and a corresponding method and program.